We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Taryn Larock . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Taryn below.

Alright, Taryn thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

For both of my companies – Sage Larock and Sea Sweepers, I was lucky to find aligned and passionate collaborators from early on in both ventures. As both are impact based, we were lucky to have had many of our team members come on board early on, because they believed deeply in what we were doing and saw the vision very clearly, they wanted to take part in what we are building.

Taryn , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am the founder and designer of the sustainable & ethical swimwear brand Sage Larock, and also the Chief Sustainability Officer of Sea Sweepers, a company I recently co-founded to build the first US based marine plastics recycling center, dedicated to cleaning up marine plastic pollution & offering businesses the opportunity to deliver consumers impactful products, all while saving our seas! We hope to disrupt the current plastic manufacturing model, which involves a lot of pollution and billions of tons of virgin plastic being produced, of which only about 10% gets recycled or repurposed annually.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

When I was planning to launch Sage Larock, I had previously worked as a model, and as an intern with eco-fashion pioneer Linda Loudermilk out of Downtown LA, but I had no formal experience, training, or even contacts in garment manufacturing. I did however have a very clear vision of what our manufacturer needed to be – totally ethical/sweat-shop free, local to Los Angeles, very skilled, and using sustainable practices. So I had to work backwards and reverse engineer how a luxury standard swimsuit was manufactured to sort out how to contract a manufacturer that met our high ethical and sustainability standards, all while meeting our quality standards. As there was no one at the time really doing what we were searching for, it took several months of searching & research. I don’t advocate that this is the correct way to go about finding a product manufacturer, as it took A LOT of trial & error, and initially took more resources (time + money) than this process should have in hindsight. However, throughout this process I got a massive education in garment production, and because I had to source everything myself & vet production staff, I was forced to learn everything about technical swimwear design, manufacturing and fitting, which in the end was a huge blessing, especially for an entrepreneur / designer with a small team. Ultimately, I feel this forced us to deliver a much higher quality product.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I initially launched Sage Larock, most retailers thought I was insane when I said I was manufacturing luxury swimwear out of upcycled fishing gear and was manufacturing ethically in LA instead of overseas in China or LATAM. I had to come to terms with the fact that I would have to really advocate for my brand & educate retailers in a way that traditional (not sustainable or ethical) brands would never have to. I had to tune out all the strange looks and the long list of questions I got when I would explain what we were doing and why. However – this also became what differentiated us and got some amazing retailers and press to pay attention to us early on, and place repeat orders once they understood the value add. This also has been what has helped us develop a strong brand name & repeat customers. So the moral of the story is, if you are providing a clear solution to a problem and a quality product you believe in – learn to hear no as just an opinion, and learn from the feedback provided to strengthen your pitch and product, and keep at it!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.seasweepers.io www.sagelarock.com
• Instagram: @sage_larock @seasweepers.io

Image Credits
Taryn Larock